150 trains will pass Georgia in 2017 via Trans Caspian Transport Corridor. This plan of Georgian railways seems skeptical for logistics experts. They say that this year, they carried few containerized cargo by this railway. Director of “Trans Caucasus Terminal” will talk about how realistic the plan is.

Georgian railway expects to receive 150 trains next year, what is this forecast based on?

This did not start with 150 trains. In August and September, 5 trains already passed the trail, but the primary reason for it was testing them. We tried to check logistic technologies schemes and terrific scales, which is created in advance in the frame of International Trans Caucasian railway.

How many countries are involved in this corridor?

These are: China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey as an associated member. Next year Ukraine will be added.

The association was created to come up with a tariff policy, to secure the infrastructure and etc. Are there any improvements in the frame of association work? Should we expect that they are going to organize flexible tariff and logistics issues and that’s why they think they can manage to receive 150 trains?

First of all, the announcement that we are going to receive 150 trains is based on the work and statistics we implemented in our association. We organized these works with our Kazakh and Azerbaijanian partners. We will establish constant working office in Astana and it will monitor the market and our technologies constantly.

What about the competition at the market?

There is a competition and we are working on developing infrastructure all the time. However, competition and tariffs are not as important as geographical location. We have our strategic markets for cargo which comes from China.

W e don’t say that we will be competitive in sense of distributing cargo for example from China to Scandinavian countries. We believe that Turkish market is our strategic market. Trading between Turkey and China increases every year and amounts to few billions of USD. We have very good expectations about central Europe, because one of the biggest railways has recently become our strategic partner.